Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (3 page)

“So she was a Roman.”

“A Gaul.”

“You sound partisan,” Picaro remarked. The drink had loosened his tongue, and his mind. He had lifted up above it, everything else, and become only a young man again, sitting at a table under a false moon, taking an interest in current affairs. Tomorrow none of this would matter. But tonight—tonight was a kind of holiday from himself.

“I’m partisan all right,” said Flayd. He cracked the lobster open after all. “I can aquadive. I helped locate and excavate her tomb, in the undersea mud near the drowned circus. She was quite a find. A true rarity.”

“Why?”

“She’d been one of the Ludicae—the Games Girls—a gladiatrix. A damn good one—she’d fought regularly in the local amphitheater for five years, before she died. And they buried her like royalty.”

Y
OUNG GIRLS DANCED
, with garlanded, whipping hair.

The guests barely looked at them, their quick feet and quivering breasts, the dark-skinned flute girl playing, and her sleepy, cunning eyes.

Later there would be a battle from
The Iliad
of the Greeks, enacted by five male dancers with genuinely sharpened blades and little bows. Probably they would incur some injuries, despite their skill.

The second course was still in progress. After the eggs, snails and lettuce, the olives and white figs, the roast hares had come in, the peacock skewered in his brazen skin, the slices of goose liver and tubs of venison and architectures of thrushes braised with honey and poppy seeds, and the silver cradles of shellfish from the Fulvia district. The sweetened wine had been replaced by a Greek wine of Karia, chilled with splintered ice from the villa’s ice well, and heady with myrrh, aloes, and oil of cinnamon.

The myrtle fans of the slaves brushed off the heaviness of the evening air. Boys, chosen for their looks, poured the drink into the goblets, each of which was decorated with gold.

Aside from the dancers, and the attendant slaves, there were no women.

For the one woman seated at the end of her master’s couch did not count as a woman at all.

“Oh, Julus, you miser. Lend her to me. You said you would.” (This, fat Drusus, scrubbing his mouth with a napkin now as greasy as his face.)

“No, dear Drusus. I think I never did.”

“But you did. For my bodyguard. She can teach the others how to fight.”

They laughed.

“What does Jula Victrix say?” asked another of the guests, a bald and sweating man prone to fondling the wine boys.

Jula looked in his direction. She spoke frankly and emptily, “I am my master’s property.” Nothing was really expected of her here, but obedience, docility—and her own essential show. She was a tamed leopard on a chain, trained to take food at table like a human being.

The bald man chuckled now. “True. She’s made the wretch richer even than he was.”

The others made no comment. The gracious dining-room, with its mosaic floor and painted walls, was no place to talk crudely of money.

But then Drusus mildly offered, “Myself also, let it be said. I bet on Julus’s Jula, as always, and as always I won.”

“Once she lost me sesterces without number,” said the bald man. He chewed some meat and said, “I never did believe in a woman gladiator. By Minerva, women weren’t meant to do such things.”

Julus said, “Come now, Stirius. You see they can. Besides, any legionary could tell you as much. In Gallia and Hispania the women will put up a fight like she-bears. In the Tin Isles they ride into battle in chariots. The men have to run to keep up with them.”

“Harsher and more cruel than any man,” agreed the other, the scholarly guest known as the Scroll.

“Are you harsh and cruel, Jula?” asked oil-greasy Drusus.

The gladiatrix looked at him with her lowered eyes, and away.

This flirtatious carping did not generally last long, though sometimes it occurred in patches. But the wine, with its mix of scent and narcotic, (diluted occasionally by water, or the effusions of roses) blurred the edges of their discourse. They would get on to other matters soon. The dancers would be pulled on to the couches, or the wine boys, if Julus allowed it.

The bellaria was being brought in and laid out on separate ivory tables, to engage the eyes of the feasters, saffron pastries, and pomegranates, cakes decorated by white flowers, and twisted sweets of honey.

A couple of Julus’s male gladiators couched across from the diners. Their table, like the others, was of patterned citrus wood. They were served from the same dishes. Yet, unlike Jula, they had been kept a little apart and already shown off, their muscles and teeth admired.

The dancers finished. They glided from the central floor, over the tesserae of maenads. Stirius caught one and she sank beside him, doll-like and compliant. (Jula noted Drusus and Julus exchange a surreptitious nod. It seemed they had been betting too on which their companion would choose, boy or girl.)

That Stirius missed. Instead he had an observation.

“Now
this
is a woman.”

His hand detached itself from his wine cup and slipped the dancer’s tunic from her shoulder, revealing most of a round young breast.

“But your gladiator woman,” said Stirius, “gives no evidence of that.
Is
she a female?”

Jula had met such questions before. In the arena
her breasts were bound to steady them, and so hidden, just as her red spiked hair, once she had been seen and identified in the processional Pompa, was covered by her secutor’s helmet.

Now she did nothing, but under her leveled lowered eyelids, she took in the person of Stirius.

Such faces had come before her belonging to armed adversaries. Ones usually that she found easy to kill. But this time, (obviously) not.

Her master waved his arm, indicating the messy meat dishes should be cleared to make way for the bellaria. That was all. But as slaves swarmed between the tables whisking things up, mopping over spills, Stirius lay along his couch, one hand on the dancer’s waist, staring, perhaps noting that his coarse remarks, too, were being cleared from the dinner.

What did he want, the bald man who had lost money on her? So many lost money at the games. Any victory was always unlucky for some.

A third wine came with the dessert. It was a swarthy and terrible wine, meant to be much diluted, and sipped.

The scholarly Scroll had interrupted the proceedings, insisting on reading to them all a tale he had come across in one of his books.

Julus indulged him. The Scroll was wealthy and influential and, by some distant relationship through marriage, had connections to the young emperor in Rome. The tale anyway was lewd. It concerned girls who fled gods and were changed into animals, trees, or rivers, which, in each case, the god in question then still ravished.

They’ll let me go soon, then I can sleep
.

She had eaten little. This sort of food was not her normal fare, nor did she greatly like it. Given her always as a reward, titbit or feast were meaningless, of course.
For she had no choice but to attempt to please, to
fight
well. She had wanted to live from the first—unlike the Ethiopian, who determined not to.

I am like Playful
, she thought.

Playful was the old lioness. Kept now at the town’s expense, after years of her successful slaughterings of those criminals and lesser swordsmen sent against her. Playful had been “freed,” was popular, and might be visited in her cage below the arena. In the Pompa, too, Playful was walked on leash, with flowers around her neck.

That then, Jula’s fate? To survive and gain freedom—the ultimate reward for her inevitable struggles—to live at the whim and expense of Stagna Maris … in a cage?

But she would not live. No. Her expectancy of life was, at the most, seven years. The majority did not last even so long.

And they would never free her. As if they guessed that unlike Playful in this one thing, if ever set free—she would be gone, gone for ever, although she did not know to where.

But where did any man or any woman go?

We vanish
, she thought.
We disappear
.

Strange thoughts. The Ethiopian had done this to her. Had he cursed her truly? And would it claim her, his curse?

Her wounds, which all night had ached and stung as if biting at her under her actor’s draped gown, had been quite severe. They might have killed her, if the surgeons were not so skilled. (They hurt less now—the wine.)

So why think of this? … the other country …

Stop thinking of this.

Yes, the wine was very strong, and through the blur of it, thickening like the smoke of the lamps, the torches round the villa walls, the guests’ faces, bulbous and distorted,
like fish swimming in water and seen through an amber lens—

Jula heard rain falling hard against the house. Yet through the columns, in the summer courtyard, the night was still and close and silent.

Despite the open court, the air was too thin in this room. Drained by these Roman men, this master-race, it had no substance for her heavy leaden barbarian lungs to take hold of. So she did not pull at it any more, simply let it whisper in as it would.

Bald Stirius was rubbing his hands over the body of the dancer. Drusus had had the leftovers of the peacock brought back, was selecting what he would take home with him.

Fishes, swimming … to the sea—

Out on the floor, they were fighting
The Iliad
now. Bizarrely, with no sound at all, mouths gaping and shutting, dumb.

Though, through the rush of the sea she had mistaken for rain, she heard the Scroll mutter: “Look, Julus, she’s nodded off. Look at that. She was cut about rather today, wasn’t she, your prize girl?”

Julus said, along the couch behind her, a mile off, “A scratch or two. Nothing to her, I promise you.”

Oh, they speak of me
.

“Well, she’s tired. She’s asleep. What a fine profile she has! She should be copied in marble.”

“She isn’t asleep. Her eyes are open. Look. She’s watching our mock fight. It must amuse her. She’s smiling, aren’t you, my gladiatrix?”

T
HE BOAT, THE BOAT
in the dark, out on the night lagoon. That of Aquila, yes Aquila, for there was the shadow of the fort, the cresset burning high over its parapet …

But a coin, did she have any to pay him?—the One who poled the boat away, away, out and out, across the water to the sea.

Save it would not be sea, not now. It would be the River.

And the night sky—no, that was not sky. It was the world above, which made the roof, without a single star.

And oh, the cresset of fire was not the beacon of Aquila either, but the last bright sunset of the funeral pyre.

T
HESE OUR ACTORS
, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air
…

“What, sin? What did you say to me?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought you said the air was thin. Let me assure you, the air is just perfect, signore. Nothing to worry over. Full CX maintained air function. The dome is one hundred percent safe at all times.”

Half invisible in darkness, Picaro was lit a second by the lightning flash of his smile. The one he kept for decent people, passing through.

T
HE WANDERLIER WAS SINGING
again. It didn’t offend so much, now Picaro was drunk. To be drunk—was all that currently mattered.

At last he could really see the liquid black of the canals over which the boat glided, and the dim floating by of seemingly unanchored walls, some with lights, that glowed like the illuminations of long ago; latticed Eastern renaissance globes, oil lamps and gas lamps from the nineteenth century, candles … and these silvery-gold glimmerings, smashed, broken over and over by the oar-pole of the wanderlier.

It was beautiful, the City. But false as the set of a movie or a virtuality. Even if these buildings might be seen from all sides,
lived
in.

Picaro glanced at his wristecx and touched it for the time. The luminous numbers displayed for a moment the fact that it was after 4
A.M
. But it wasn’t, not any more, for he had omitted to instruct the wristecx to reset to the Viorno-Votte. And he had asked the wanderlier, getting into the boat, and been told, fifty minutes earlier, that it was the twenty-fifth hour. He had let the man pole him to the Rivoalto then, to watch the moon go down behind the palace of the Ducemae.

Now, in the great loom of darkness with its gilded light-lace edges, a flotilla of salt swans moved by, long necks snakelike, black in shadow. Before, gulls had flown over. Few of these creatures were actual. But they looked entirely real, and if he had been able physically to put his hand on them, they might even have convinced him that they were, for half a second.

Was that the secret? Not alone of the undersea Venus, but of everything—of the earth—of life?

Flayd had talked so much about the woman gladiator, and Picaro had forgotten it all as soon as Flayd sank his head on his arms, on the aftermath of table, and begun softly to snore. Picaro left him there, left him and his gladiatrix and all the talk of the two dead who could be brought back. Picaro informed the waiters the meal should be charged to his account. He even left the gratuity in dollari—the coins that were still used in the City, and carried the head of the goddess Venus.

It would be necessary to tip the boatman too. Indulgent, scornful, Picaro watched him, a strong man, in costume, without a care in the world.

“Sin, there is a wanderer following my boat,”
announced the wanderlier as they swung into the next turn, and above, a glistering, spectral church sailed near and then away.

“Yes,” said Picaro. “Is there?”

“Look, signore.”

Picaro, (indulgent, scornful) half turned.

As they swam on, another wanderer swam after them into the latest canal. Under the cats-eye lanterns along the church front, Picaro made out two women sitting back in the second boat, one in a crimson and one a sage-green gown.

“Sinnas,” said the wanderlier, beaming congratulatory. Picaro shrugged.

“Can you lose them?”

“
Lose
them, signore? Demisellas of such pulchritude—”

“Yes.”

“You’re unkind, sin. Very well. But remember, Venus is the City of Love—”

“No. Venus is the city of darkness.”

“That too,” allowed the pedantic wanderlier, guiding them suddenly away through a side channel, where the adjacent, apparently ancient buildings leaned each side close enough to finger. “That’s the old name. Ve Nera—which means ‘Going to meet the Dark.’”

Something—it was like the high-strung note of a violin—sounded kilometers up in Picaro’s brain.

“Lose the other boat,” he repeated. “Then take me to the Alchimia Canal.”

H
E HAD MEANT DEATH
, surely, the poet-dramatist, when he wrote about the sorcerer’s actors who were really spirits, and had vanished “into thin air.” Picaro considered
this, and with surprise, saw he was still in the boat, adrift, yet now it was quite different.

That the canals of the new restored Venus were clean, and odorless, was not quite true. They had a kind of faintly
laundered
smell.

This water smelled ripe, nearly swampy, of rotten fruit, of fish—like the polluted seas that elsewhere hugged the coasts.

And it wasn’t, any more, a boat he was on. Now it was an island.

Picaro stood on an island in a great lagoon, and no lights showed, but the boat was coming toward him, over it, and he was waiting for the boat.

I’m dreaming
.

He saw a woman in a long grayish robe stepping through the shallow surf, walking up on to the island. Her head was covered by a veil but he caught the pallid glitter of her eyes. She reeked of sulphur. She must be a sibyl from some cave of the Romans.

He confronted her on the path.

Behind her, the sky was thick with stars, but they were dull, not half so bright as her eyes.

She said, “You will meet your death at thirty.” And paused.

Picaro said, “I know. You told me this before. I was sixteen and it was in another place. You weren’t as you are tonight.”

But remorseless, the sibyl added, “You will die under water. Though not from drowning.”

“I know,” he said again.

And effortlessly woke. And in the met darkness, said once more, “I know.”